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Will and World$
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N. M. L. Nathan

Print publication date: 1992

Print ISBN-13: 9780198239543

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198239543.001.0001

Introduction

Chapter:
(p. 1 ) 1 Introduction
Source:
Will and World
Author(s):

N. M. L. Nathan

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198239543.003.0001

In a want and belief conflict, one wants something to be true, but believes it to be false. In a positive solution, the world changes. In a negative solution, the change is only in one's attitudes. In positive solution, one's beliefs is abolished by the very change in the world by virtue of which it was false. One or both of one's two conflicting attitudes may even be deliberately destroyed. Some want and beliefs, however, have no positive solution. There is in particular no positive solution to conflicts in which what one wants is that some purely metaphysical proposition is true. Maybe there are spiritual substances, naturally necessary connections between events, non-natural moral properties, and real objects with colour qualities.

Keywords:   want, belief, conflict, positive solution, negative solution, metaphysics

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